Creating animations with GIMP

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Although developed for editing individual images, GIMP has everything you need to create perfect animations via plugins and scripts.

Animations and movies have much in common and a few differences; whereas movies are made of multiple images (frames) grouped in a video container file, animations in GIMP comprise multiple layers in a single image. In a movie, the frames follow in quick succession; in an animation, in layers.

The GIMP tool provides two variants for creating moving images: Either the new layer replaces the existing one (known as replace mode), or a new, transparent layer adds its content to the current image (combine mode). Movies often use a similar approach to reduce file size.

Many users turn to GIMP for pictures in the window, but some may not realize GIMP also has scripting capabilities that allow you to automate recurring tasks. The Python scripting language is a useful alternative to the GIMP’s integrated Lisp dialect.

The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is often called the premium open source image manipulation project. Version 2.0 was released in February 2004, and now GIMP 2.2 is available. This article looks at GIMP’s progress over the past year.